37 comments:

So at the end of life the best we can offer is "try to be a little kinder"?

I like it. There's a recognition that the main goal changing other people or systems (particularly big social systems) isn't the most effective way to live. It has to do with ourselves.

It might not be how I would put it - I'd be more inclined to say "work on dumping your self-importance, restrict that ego!", but being a little kinder fits right in there. That's change I can believe in.

You want to go out FridayAnd you want to go foreverYou know that it sounds childishThat you dreamt of alligatorsYou hope that we are with youAnd you hope you're recognizedYou want to go foreverYou see it in my eyesI'm lost in the confusionAnd it doesn't seem to matterYou really can't believe itAnd you hope it's getting better

You want to trust the doctorsTheir procedure is the bestBut the last try was a failureAnd the intern was a messAnd they did the same to MatthewAnd he bled 'til Sunday nightThey're saying don't be frightenedBut you're weakened by the sight of itYou lock into a patternAnd you know that it's the last ditchYou're trying to see through itAnd it doesn't make senseBut they're saying don't be frightenedAnd they're killing alligatorsAnd they're hog-tiedAnd accepting of the struggle

You want to trust religionAnd you know it's allegoryBut the people who are followersHave written their own storySo you look up to the heavensAnd you hope that it's a spaceshipAnd it's something from your childhoodYou're thinking don't be frightened

You want to climb the ladderYou want to see foreverYou want to go out FridayAnd you want to go foreverAnd you want to cross your DNATo cross your DNA with something reptile

And you're questioning the sciencesAnd questioning religionYou're looking like an idiotAnd you no longer careAnd you want to bridge the schism,A built-in mechanism to protect youAnd you're looking for salvationAnd you're looking for deliveranceYou're looking like an idiotAnd you no longer care'Cause you want to climb the ladderYou want to go foreverAnd you want to go out FridayYou want to go forever

The Aldous Huxley quote having to do with death that has particularly stuck with me is this: “You mean what everybody means nowadays…. Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.” (From Time Must Have a Stop, 1944.)

Which in turn always reminds me of SF author Poul Anderson's haunting story “The Problem of Pain” (Feb. 1973; collected in his The Earth Book of Stormgate, 1978), which I can't really summarize right now but I think is well worth checking out in this context.

In the first volume of 'Parerga und Paralipomena, I read once more that all things that can occur to a man, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death, have been predetermined by him. Thus, all inadvertence is deliberate, every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, every humiliation an act of penitence, every failure a misterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more cunning than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes; that individual theology reveals a secret order, and in a marvelous way confuses ourselves with the deity.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

In the first volume of 'Parerga und Paralipomena, I read once more that all things that can occur to a man, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death, have been predetermined by him. Thus, all inadvertence is deliberate, every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, every humiliation an act of penitence, every failure a misterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more cunning than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes; that individual theology reveals a secret order, and in a marvelous way confuses ourselves with the deity.

Except that what that division of natural philosophy known as quantum physics has revealed to us (via such things as Bell's theorem, as backed up by solid experiment) is that God himself, much less anybody or anything else, does not and cannot foreknow the consequences of truly random quantum phenomena as they percolate up into the macroscopic domain.

Michael MacNeil, that you would presume to know (and thus limit) the abilities of God is instructive.

What I stated before is astonishing, I agree, but nonetheless appears to be true. As I say, experiment (asking the world with regard to its veracity) backs it up.

But then, why shouldn't God have (some) limits? Just saying that God is absolutely and totally omniscient and omnipotent doesn't make it so.

Galileo Galilei: True knowledge is written in this enormous book which is continuously opened before our eyes. I speak of the universe. But one can't understand it unless first one learns to understand the language and recognize the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics.

If there is matter too fine for our crude instruments to detect (the eye included), our current understanding of quantum theory would likely be plain wrong.

I suggest learning something about Bell's theorem. What it states, and experiment confirms, is that such fine inner structure (“hidden variables”) of matter does not exist, or else the observed behavior of the world would be different from what we see.

Michael, how does science tell us what God knows and can't know. How can science for instance state definitively that what seems random to us is random to God.

Science only can say what it can test. You go well beyond science to talk about theology, because science cannot test God.

God is not us. God's way of knowledge, outside of time and space, is not knowable to us. And so there's very much nothing we can determine about what God knows, entirely outside the issue of his potential limitations.

I have a gut feeling that something "truly ramdom" is another way of saying 'we just don't know yet'.

Gut feeling = intuition. And yet, many many people throughout history have experienced strong intuitions and ended up being flat wrong.

Take the (free) neutron, for instance. There appears to be absolutely no inner structure to a neutron flying free in space that would distinguish it from all other such free neutrons, and thus there can be no causitive agent (aka hidden variables) within any particular such neutron that would “cause” it to decay when it does (average half-life for a free neutron is around 15 minutes, but whose decay in any particular case might occur within the next nanosecond, or might not occur for a billion years).

And what makes us think (beyond things like Bell's theorem and subsequent experiments conirming it) that all neutrons (et al.) are absolutely and totally identical? A little matter called Fermi-Dirac statistics, which are quite easy to explain and yet utterly profound in their implications.

When one tosses a two-headed coin, say, in our world, there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will turn up heads or tails. This remains true in the quantum domain (for a particulate “coin”) as well.

In our macroscopie realm when one tosses two such coins, the probabilities change: there's a 25% chance of getting two heads, a 25% chance of getting two tails, and a 50% chance for there to be one head and one tails. Why is that?

The answer is because two coins are not identical in our macroscopic world; and one quite distinguishable coin (simply mark one if you can't otherwise tell) can turn up heads, while the other simultaneously falls tails (for a 25% chance of that), while there's another equal 25% chance of those two particular coins going in the opposite direction: where the first turns up tails and the second goes heads.

Thus, the probabilities in both theory and averaged-out practice (for distinguishable coins, as all such must be in our macroscopic world) are that 25% will turn up both heads, 25% for both to go tails, and 50% for the combined cases of one (either of them) turning up tails while the other goes heads.

In the quantum realm the observed statistical consequences are quite different. The equivalent of the “throwing two-headed coins” experiment results not in 25%-50%-25% behavior, but rather in an average of 33%-33%-33%: one-third of the “coin” tosses turn up on average with both being heads, one-third as both tails, and one-third altogether where one is heads and the other tails.

(Even ignoring such independent confirmatory indications as Bell's theorem), the only sensible way to interpret these results is if all neutrons, say (in the given example, but the same holds true for other quantum particles), are absolutely identical, and thus the (macroscopically distinguishable) cases where one of a pair of such particles turns up “heads” while the other goes “tails” cannot be distinguished (because the particles really are absolutely and truly identical) from the situation where each goes in the opposite direction, and thus the two cases' statistical behavior merges into one of one-third probability altogether.

(Eerie music playing.) Pretty magical, huh?

If all quantum particles of a given type are identical, then they cannot contain hidden variables within that “cause” one to decay, say, sooner than, or otherwise behave differently from, another.Q.E.D.

You don't know that. Perhaps death is what gives meaning to all that came before.

Some believe that the 'life flashing before your eyes' experience is what living is all about. The reflection upon what you did right and wrong. Those who believe in re-incarnation, a great many people around the world do, believe that death and the time between lives is where you, the soul, learn and evolve.

The ability of man to even think about death in a philosophical manner (instead of like a cat about to be squashed on the freeway) is a miracle.

Without death is there a reason for our awareness and reflections on living?

My husband, experienced a near death episode years ago. He almost bled to death from a stomach ulcer. He has said, after that experience, there was no fear in dying and that it was actually a peaceful and comforting thing. He was more concerned about living and being a good person and death was nothing to be afraid of. Well, maybe a painful excruciating death might be fearful. But the end result not.

Michael (sorry about misspelling your name last time), doesn't this miss the possibility that there may be causative agents outside each identical particle which influence their behavior and/or decay?

That's true. Bell's theorem, for instance (together with its subsequent confirmatory experiments), demonstrates that either a) the universe is not deterministic (i.e., every effect may not have a “cause”), or b) the universe is non-local (that is, measurements on one member of an associated pair of particles can affect the other no matter how far apart they may be). The latter appears intuitively wrong, but may not in actuality be. Of course, for many people the former also appears intuitively wrong, but nonetheless may not be.

Paddy O. expressed what I was trying to imply: God is outside of the observable universe. To say with certainty that something is not possible for God is to misunderstand entirely what God is.

Right. However, folks vigorously asserting this proposition are not properly appreciating the fact that by insisting on a deterministic universe — or, to put it another way, that causality rules everywhere and everything — that in itself is a matter of them binding God (or seeking to bind God) to have only produced (and only been able to produce) a cosmos of strict cause and effect.

Now quantum physics, pretty much experimentally the most strongly confirmed scientific field in history, strongly indicates that that's not so — but many folks nonetheless rigidly insist that it is — which is basically them flinching in terror away from the very thought of really random phenomena operating in this real, physical universe that we live in, while they cling to obsolete physical formulations (the law of cause and effect) that are several centuries old and basically Newtonian in origin.

Meanwhile, Newton's theory of gravity (“law” of gravity being basically the old way of saying “theory” — as there are no “laws” per se in science, merely theories) has also been tossed out on its ear, in lieu of Einsteinian relativity, which has also been very thoroughly experimentally confirmed — in spades.

Note that while Einstein himself (along with numerous other physicists) long clung to deterministic concepts — expressed in his famous proclamation that “God does not play dice” — nonetheless though physicists of that ilk have sought for going on a century now to restore determinism to what they think of as its rightful position on a scientific pedestal, they have utterly failed to achieve this.

At this point one can only reply as Niels Bohr ultimately did to Einstein's assertions in this regard, to wit: “Stop telling God what to do!”

Because if God wanted to create a universe where true randomness exists and plays a fundamental role (perhaps one of the most fundamental) in the nature of our cosmos, one must grant that God is perfectly capable of doing so — and, by all (extremely strong) appearances, did so.

Michael, I strongly suspect you would find the works of John Polkinghorne and Wolfhart Pannenberg immensely interesting. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist (quite esteemed one) who became a theologian and Anglican priest. Pannnenberg is one of the top theologians of the last 50 years and he has made quantum physics a key part of his own theological development. Both are quite orthodox theologians.

Note that this isn't a dodge to your arguments, just a suggestion that anything said in comments will almost certainly not be enough for your apparent interest.

The key, again, is that determinism to us isn't binding on God, or rather it's that he is not limited to even the randomness of our perceived system. Even with apparent randomness at the quantum scale there is predictability and the ability to manipulate reality--something science depends on. And even with apparent randomness systems can often exhibit striking order, and even beauty, as the randomness of many, many individual points resolves itself into a set, extremely complex, pattern. Something we see even within our experience of time.

This is, it seems, basically the whole free will and determinism, which can exist, it seems, within the same, infinitely complex, system. But, trying to get at this is the subject of centuries and centuries of learned debates.

Thanks, Paddy, for the references; it is an extremely interesting topic. I'll look into those writers, but at least initially I'm not sure I agree with humans' (even physicists and theologians) philosophical speculations concerning what God might or might not be limited to vis-a-vis our own (as entities in the world) obvious limitations.

While the quantum world — even with built-in randomness — does have its own predictability (oftentimes mostly of a statistical nature), that doesn't mean, I think, that it's wholly predictable even for God. I'm not saying that that's necessarily true (who knows), but it's not obviously necessarily false either. As I said before, it might be that God isn't totally omniscient and omnipotent, despite what human beings have thought up for themselves on the matter.